Interorganizational relations and organizational effectiveness in emergency social service networks

The central thesis of this study is that redundancy in resource exchange relationships can help organizations more effectively respond to changing and uncertain environmental conditions. This thesis is based on the premise that acquisition of resources is critical for organizational effectiveness. Under conditions of uncertainty, such redundancies can serve as back-ups whenever an exchange linkages fails, thereby making resource acquisition more predictable.; Data for the study were drawn from a study of eighty emergency social service organizations concerned with disaster response and preparedness in the St. Louis metropolitan area. Data on organizational characteristics and interorganizational relations were collected under normal day-to-day conditions and, with the aid of a scenario, under assumed disaster conditions. The scenario described a region-wide, moderate earthquake and was written to be consistent with empirical damage assessments for the St. Louis area.; Two measures of redundancy were developed for this study: duplicity and multiplexity. Duplicity is a measure of exchange linkages of a single type duplicated across different organizations, while multiplexity measures multiple types of resource exchanges between pairs of organizations. The central hypothesis of the study is that organizational effectiveness is positively related to these two types of redundancy. Pre-disaster preparedness was used as an input measure of effectiveness under the assumption that organizations cannot be effective if they are unable to acquire resources needed to meet their goals. Multivariate models were specified and tested to elaborate the basic relationship between preparedness and the two redundancy measures.; Findings from the study support the hypothesis that organizational effectiveness is positively related to redundancy in resource exchange during the simulated disaster response condition. The multivariate models indicate that duplicity and multiplexity represent two distinct dimensions of redundancy and suggests that the contribution of each toward organizational effectiveness may be different. Limitations of the study are discussed and directions for future research are offered.